Yes.

See the style guide.

By going to the submission page and following the appropriate links.

You can only modify entries while submissions are still open. However, entries can be unpublished once the event is concluded.

No. It will not appear in your ballot.

15 short stories, 35 minifics, or half the entries—whichever is smallest.

An amount that approximates 35 minutes of reading/reviewing per day.

1, plus 1 for every 10 entries on your ballot.

The votes are modelled as stories playing a series of head-to-head matches against each other. For each ballot, the top ranking story beats every other story; the second ranking story beats every other story except the first, etc. This model is then resolved using maximum likelihood estimation to find a unified ranking that has the highest probability of being correct.

The result of this system is that votes are considered in the context of the other stories the voter voted for, and voters who are too harsh or too nice do not disproportionately skew results.

The scores each story gets in this system have the following interpretation:

Let the score of story x be S_x. The probability that story A will beat story B in a match is equal to S_A / (S_A + S_B). In the context of the model, this is the probability that a random voter will prefer story A to story B.

Each submission type in each event has a difficulty score calculated.

For pic submissions, it is always 500.

For fic submissions, it is equal to ten times the average square root of the event’s story’s wordcounts. For minific and short story contests, this is approximately 250 and 600 respectively.

Entries are awarded a fraction of this score based on their performance. This is equal to (1 - i/n)^b, where i is the entry’s position (e.g, “1” for 1st place), n is the number of entries in the event, and b is 1.6.

This means that, for example, in a short story contest with 20 contestants, 1st place will receive (1 - 1/20)^1.6 = 0.92 = 92% of ~600 points, 10th place will receive (1 - 10/20)^1.6 = 0.33 = 33% of ~600 points, and last place will receive 0 points.

In addition, any submission from an artist after the first will have 20% of the difficulty subtracted from its final score. In this way, it is possible for entries to get negative score, but also possible for an artist to get more points from an event with multiple entries than just one. This is to encourage multiple submissions from the same artist without encouraging people to spam entries.

After each event, scores decay by 10%. This is to encourage consistent performance and to enable newcomers to overtake the old guard.